I am almost certain that this is the reason why one of my patients recently syncopized.

Spanish-speakers are once again the majority in California.

I ran into a post about how fluoride has been classified as a neurotoxin. This should make all the conspiracy theorists salivate.

Donald Trump has decided to pick a fight with the Pope. This should be good.

Seventy-four years ago, FDR issued Executive Order 9066, which rounded up Japanese Americans and imprisoned them in camps, against the advice of the Office of Naval Intelligence and despite the fact that the FBI felt confident they had already arrested any potential subversives.

The irony is that Copernicus set forth his model of heliocentrism without any empirical evidence whatsoever, and his model was less accurate than Ptolemy's geocentric model in making predictions of planetary positions and he got the shape of orbits wrong (he thought they were circular and they're actually very slightly elliptical).

It's well known that conclusions from scientific papers can be confusing and misleading, especially when filtered through the popular press.

"Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred."

Now, I haven't actually lived in L.A. since 1999, but I go there as often as twice-a-month to visit my parents and my sibs. In the time I've been elsewhere, certainly a lot has happened. When I left for college, Echo Park and Silver Lake were still kind of sketchy areas (Echo Park is, after all, part of the demesne of the infamous Rampart Division that had its infamous special anti-gang unit) and I felt like a lot of Angelenos had no idea that Eagle Rock was in the state of California, much less part of L.A. But as R can attest, the hipster population in Echo Park and Silver Lake have certainly increased, and I continue to be astounded at how much Colorado Blvd. and Eagle Rock Blvd. have gentrified. I knew it was a beginning of a new era when a Starbucks finally opened on the corner of those aforementioned streets.

As soon as I got my driver's license, I discovered that getting behind the wheel was very therapeutic whenever I got depressed. For some reason, it seemed that I would tend to take these random drives around this time of year. Back then, I would go up into the San Gabriel Mountains, and out to the Antelope Valley. I never really had a destination in particular, but the winding, desolate roads would somehow soothe my soul. It was then when I also learned the particular advantage of driving a car with a diesel engine, which was that if you were inadvertently submerged, the engine wouldn't die like with a gasoline engine, a fact that may have been fortunate because I had to ford a rushing mountain stream on one of those drives.

I've long suspected that I may have seasonal affective disorder. Despite living in Southern California, and despite the fact that currently, it's 75°F outside and sunny, the critical factor has always been the number of hours of sunlight. So my mood always ebbs when Standard Time comes by, reaching its nadir around the winter solstice, then picking up again when Daylight Saving Time starts up. Rainy days (like the last few) make things worse. Unseasonably warm and sunny days like today make things better, but don't fix things completely.

More than anything else, this is what I’ll never feel again.

Is it because I was conceived in Las Vegas? The place has become something of a touchstone.

…my mind is notorious for concocting details after the fact. I'm just like my dad.

I feel restless and cramped. Caged, really, with no apparent hope for escape. I cannot even fantasize my way out of this madness, short of hospitalization. Maybe [St. John's wort] will help again, though. I cannot stand So Cal February gloom. I think maybe there are only a few months I can endure.